After Public Choice, I go to a history class called “The Fall of
Communism.” The same day we
discussed rational ignorance, I learned about international and domestic spy
networks during the Cold War. Amidst Cold War fears of “capitalist
encirclement,” Soviet republics watched their people constantly. Millions’
daily lives were under surveillance, often by friends and colleagues. Fueled by
paranoia, the idea was that in order to maintain a dictatorship, you had to
know everything about the lives of others.
Throughout its existence, 1 in 40 Germans informed for the
Stasi, the German Democratic Republic’s Ministry for State Security. There are
over 100 miles of files saved. Here is an
article, published 9 months after the Berlin Wall fell, about the shocking
discoveries of the Stasi’s deep infiltration. The Stasi is referred to as the
“most sophisticated and far-reaching espionage ever created.” However, my
professor argues that the Stasi gathered so much information that it
was ultimately difficult to make anything useful of it. The Stasi was omniscient, gaining knowledge to a point where the marginal cost of doing so was far greater than
the marginal benefit. The Stasi exceeded their optimal amount of surveillance. Among the many inefficiencies and perversions of communist regimes, these systems were also not rationally ignorant.
A similar analysis could be applied to big data today, though the
marginal costs and marginal benefits are certainly different than they were in
East Germany. Considering the privacy debates of the 21st century, it is
interesting to ask what the optimal amount of domestic intelligence, or rather
ignorance, is in the United States.
1 comment:
As I am also in the same history class, I agree with each of the historical statistics you introduced, but I believe that there may also be another perspective that you didn’t directly address in evaluating the marginal benefit of each additional file. One crucial element of the Stasi’s success was the fear factor, which was driven by the sheer size of the organization’s reach. Perhaps at a certain point, though the marginal cost of becoming more knowledgeable exceeded the marginal benefits to knowledge (thanks to the seemingly useless extra files), we could consider marginal benefit from the Stasi fear factor, which did not necessarily stem directly from the usefulness of information; rather it derived from the growing miles of files that kept the society paranoid of being “caught” for whatever it may have done. Thus, while it may have been rational in the sense of obtaining more knowledge to stop, perhaps collecting this extra intelligence (that yielded little to no marginal knowledge) was actually still rational if the Stasi was able to continue to grow its omniscient and omnipotent reputation.
Post a Comment